Iamschool Saves Time and Paper by Digitizing School Communiqué

Released just over two years ago, Iamschool is a news app that consolidates and digitizes announcements made from schools and hagwons (cram schools) in South Korea. Iamschool (developed by Iamcompany, CEO Ryan Inmo Jung) is one of those apps that aims to help save time gathering information from scattered sources.

For parents, the app provides numerous services to help them keep a watchful eye on their children’s academic progress. Iamschool delivers announcements from school classrooms, pushes daily homework assignments, and documents attendance via the platform.

In the case of classroom announcements, Korean public schools typically print hardcopies called “family communication letters”, which chiefly relay administrative information, such as due dates for lunch fees, plans for upcoming school trips from instructors, etc. In recent years, most of these announcements have also been made available online, but only on the institutions’ websites. For Korean school parents, who generally send their kids to more than one institution for learning, this meant having to hop around multiple websites to stay on top of a child’s educational progress.

Iamschool saves parents from such an exhaustive process. It enables them to check all that they need to know about how their child has been faring, with a single app.

On the company’s website are positive reviews from several parents. One working mother likes being updated during the day about what her son needs for school. She has found the app useful to punctually gather art materials her son had not reminded her to buy. Of course, Iamschool is not all about stressing schoolchildren with more parental attention than they need. The app is also designed for students to use, as an online backup planner for misplaced notes. School teachers and hagwon instructors can use the sister app Iamclass to send updates to parents and students on their smartphones.

The Iamschool platform has experienced tremendous growth since its launch. Recently, Iamcompany published its 2014 annual report as an infographic (see below) to recount its feats. Over the past year, the number of users increased 3.5 fold, while the number of platform-registered public schools increased to 73% of all elementary, middle, and high schools in South Korea. Iamschool electronically published 6 million announcements from schools, and 550,000 from other educational institutions. This amounts to 3,000 tons in saved paper.